The Director of the Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS), Professor Nicholas Awortwi, has called on the Ministry of Local Government, Decentralisation and Rural Development (MLGDRD) to consider empowering local assemblies to appoint their own staff as enshrined in the 1992 Constitution.
That, he said, could be done by laying the relevant Legislative Instrument emanating from the Local Governance Act, 2016 (Act 936) before Parliament to be passed into law.
Prof. Awortwi, who made the call in an interview with the Daily Graphic, explained that if the process was not started now before the country begins to elect Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives (MMDCEs), it could set back the decentralisation reform of the country.
He was analysing the manifestos of the two major political parties in the country — the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC) — in relation to decentralisation and local governance.
“If we don’t initiate the process now and the MMDCEs are elected and find out that the staff that they need to work with don’t owe allegiance to them but to someone who sits in Accra who can appoint and sack them and that he, as an elected chief executive, can’t appoint them, they would be furious and frustrated,” he pointed out.
The law
Article 240 (2) (d) Chapter 20 of the Constitution states that as far as practicable, persons in the service of local government shall be subject to the effective control of local authorities.
Prof. Awortwi explained this to mean that people who worked at the local level should be hired, paid, controlled and fired by the local level authority, as well as have accountability to them.
He, however, added that in practice currently, people who worked at the local levels were hired, paid, promoted and dismissed by the head of the Local Government Service in Accra.
He pointed out that since 1992, none of the ruling governments’ subsidiary legislations nor five of the decentralisation policies had activated that aspect of the constitution to enable local authorities to appoint their own staff, adding that Section 76 (2) of the Local Governance Act implied that if various governments were interested in activating what was stated in the Constitution, then they would have to get the Legislative Instrument to do that.
That section of the Act requires the government to legislate for the appointment of staff of the Office of the District Assembly by the District Assembly. So we are waiting for that legislative Instrument that will give powers to the district assemblies to appoint their own staff,” he said
Global practice
Referring to the standard practice globally, Prof. Awortwi said in many countries around the world that practised real decentralisation, the people who worked at the local level were hired by the local assemblies, while for Ghana since colonial days, it had been the central government who controlled everything local.
But he said the MLGDRD could start the process of MMDAs appointing their staff on a pilot basis with the bigger MMDAs such as Accra, Tema and Kumasi.